


Unrolling the Loop

by weakinteraction



Category: Marvel 616, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl
Genre: F/F, Friends to Lovers, Marvel Cameos, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-14
Updated: 2017-05-14
Packaged: 2018-10-25 13:05:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 12,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10764861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/pseuds/weakinteraction
Summary: Of all the days for Nancy to get stuck in a time loop, it had to be one with a midterm.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scintilla10](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scintilla10/gifts).



"Nancy, wake up! Wake up, Nancy!"

Doreen was hammering on her bedroom door. Nancy knew that in fact she was carefully controlling her squirrel-proportionate strength to avoid smashing it straight off its hinges, but it sure as hell didn't feel as though she was to Nancy's sleep-fogged brain.

"I overslept, Nancy; we have like negative one point five minutes to leave the house."

Nancy glanced at her clock and saw that Doreen was right.

"I don't want to be late for the Neural Networks and Adaptive Learning midterm," Doreen said.

"You know that studying for the midterm is _why_ we overslept, right?" Nancy said as she reluctantly swung herself out of the bed.

"Come on, Nancy, let's go!"

"I'm going, I'm going," Nancy said. But the softness of her mattress called to her. Just a little extra sleep would surely really help her do her very best.

"Don't go back to sleep on me, Whitehead!" Doreen called.

Nancy cursed and stumbled to the door, almost colliding with Doreen's tail as she rushed around.

"We won't make the subway now but I can still jump us across to campus if we're ready in the next ten minutes," Doreen said.

"Really?" Nancy said. "I'm not sure my stomach can take that so early in the morning."

"Come on!" Doreen was already heading back to her bedroom to sort out her Squirrel Girl costume so that she would be in disguise for the journey across the New York rooftops.

"It's dumb, you know, making us do a pen-and-paper test to prove that we have learned how to make machines learn. The midterm should be to write code that can pass the midterm, or something."

"I'm sure if you write an essay about that, you'll get full credit," Doreen said. "After all, you spent most of the study time last night going on about it, so it's what you're prepared for!"

"Whoa. Doreen, was that ... Was that a burn?"

"You know I get stressed by tests," Doreen said. "And by being late. And now both are happening at the same time, and here you are chatting away as though we're not late for a test when you should be showering and brushing your teeth." As she spoke, Doreen used just a tiny bit of her strength to propel Nancy through the door of the bathroom and into the shower cubicle. She passed Nancy her toothbrush and added, "At the same time!"

It was only when Doreen hit the on switch that Nancy realised she was still wearing her pajamas.

* * *

Five minutes later, after what had to be one of the fastest showers of her life, Nancy emerged from the bathroom to find Doreen holding out an outfit for her. The combination wasn't what Nancy would have picked out for herself, but then thanks to Maureen, she'd seen pictures of the original Squirrel Girl costume.

"Come on, come on, we have to go!"

Just before they left, Tippy-Toe handed them each a mug of coffee. Doreen gulped it down gratefully, while Nancy said "Thank you, Tippy, you're a life saver" before taking a big swig.

A moment later, she was spitting it out into the sink. "This is acorn coffee, isn't it?"

"Best kind," Tippy-Toe chirped, and Nancy almost wished she hadn't learned Squirrelese after all.

Mew curled up against her legs and Nancy gave her a quick scritch between the ears before following Doreen to the fire escape.

"OK, Nancy, are you ready?"

 _I'm never ready for this,_ Nancy thought, but she said "Sure."

Before she had even finished speaking, Doreen had scooped her up and launched herself off the rooftop. The experience was dizzying, exciting and frightening all at once, and not just because of the lurching sensations in her stomach or seeing the upturned faces of people down below staring and pointing. Only a small number of the bystanders paid them any attention -- this was New York, after all -- but she could well imagine that they were speculating about what situation Squirrel Girl was dealing with now. They would probably be disappointed if they learned it was just making it on time to a test.

But what really made Nancy's stomach lurch wasn't the constant up and down motion as they bounded from rooftop to rooftop, or the amazing way Doreen landed and then took off again in the same fluid motion, it was the feeling of being wrapped in the arms of the woman she had fallen head over heels in love with, even though the object of her desires had no idea about it.

It had started as a mild enough crush when they had first met. When she had figured out that Doreen was Squirrel Girl -- which hadn't, in the end, been at all difficult -- it had intensified, both in terms of her admiration of her personality and her private speculations about the sort of things someone with Doreen's abilities might be able to get up to in bed. By the time Doreen had been heading back home for Christmas at the end of their first semester, Nancy had had to admit to herself that she was in deep trouble. The whole vacation had passed in a blur. Every time her smartphone told her she had a new message, she assumed it was from Doreen. Which, to be fair, it most often was. Even a "Cute!" response to Nancy's latest picture of Mew was enough to give her day a lift.

Over the last year and a half, Nancy's self-doubt, which she usually kept under control but seemed to have special methods for applying itself to relationships, had insisted that Doreen would never reciprocate her feelings for any one of a number of reasons: maybe she wasn't interested in girls, maybe she wasn't interested in anyone at all because superheroics took up all her time, maybe she was only interested in other superheroes, oh God what if what she was really interested in super _villains_? As time had gone on, these various worries had waxed and waned. What Nancy had been convinced was Doreen's low level crush on Tomas seemed to fade into their being crimefighting teammates. The whole business with Mole Man didn't really prove anything about a general hypothetical preference for supervillains, Nancy felt. But it hadn't escaped her notice that all the dates Doreen had had when she'd tried online dating had been with boys (or at least male-identified Sentinels). Then again, it wasn't like any of those dates had been very successful. And the whole thing had been conducted very much as a team effort -- indeed, hadn't Nancy herself written Doreen's profile? There was no way for any of them to know that she had been pouring out her own feelings in doing that. There was just enough wiggle room for Nancy to hold on to hope. What if Doreen just wasn't ready to be out? She was used to having a secret identity after all. Being in the closet was second nature to her. And it wasn't as though Nancy had actually told anyone at ESU she was gay, herself. She'd never said she hadn't, either. It had just never come up. At all. For nearly two years.

Nancy had hoped that her feelings might mellow into something less acute with time, but then Doreen kept doing things like this: picking her up bodily and jumping around the city. Also saving her from complicated death traps. Also remembering the right brand of cat food for Mew. Also lying back on the couch that particular way she did.

"OK, so!" Doreen said as they were nearing campus. "Simulated annealing. Outline an algorithm in pseudocode."

"No," Nancy said. "I absolutely veto studying in mid-air."

Sometimes, though, Nancy thought it was probably a very good thing she was so in love with Doreen, or she would find her really, really irritating.

* * *

While Doreen was changing back into her regular clothes, she chatted to Tomas and Ken. It turned out that their late night study session had had a similar effect on the two of them, and they'd only made it on time thanks to some assistance from Ken's fishy forces. Nancy wasn't quite sure how that would work, and decided she didn't really want to ask.

When Doreen came round the corner wearing her regular clothes (the faintly ridiculous but adorable way she walked, hips and arms swaying back and forth: also relevant to Nancy's interests), she made a big fuss of talking loudly about how she was glad she wasn't late. This earned her glares from several other members of the class who were engaged in last minute cramming. Nancy was rescued from having to play along with a whole complicated "Why didn't you wake me up?" thing Doreen was improvising by Professor Hale coming out with a stern look on her face.

Nancy didn't think that Professor Hale was anywhere near as bad in general as her reputation painted her -- the one time she'd gone to see her during office hours, she'd been perfectly pleasant. But her tests in particular were notorious for being tough. No one ever dared to ask her if she graded on a curve -- the rumour, passed down from one year to the next, was that someone who had long since graduated had once asked that question, and been assigned an extra essay on the advantages and disadvantages of norm referencing versus criterion referencing.

They walked in, mouthing "Good luck" to each other only to be met with an imperious stare from Hale.

The first question wasn't too bad, as it turned out: all that was required was a fairly straightforward explanation of how to train a neural network. But, after a few questions about the details of various different machine learning implementations, and a fairly standard thing about evaluating different possible techniques for particular problems, the final essay was a doozy: "Is true artificial intelligence possible?" Nancy knew that Professor Hale liked to go on about this sort of thing, but she had to admit to herself that those were the times that she tended to tune out of the discussion. In all honesty, the very fact that Doreen got so into it was part of the reason: she was too busy watching her geek out to do so herself.

She thought about writing about how this wasn't on the syllabus, instead of actually answering the question, but decided that it was probably sufficiently adjacent to what they had learned that Professor Hale would be able to justify it as a stretching question. She briefly considered the possibility that the question was only on the test to keep people who finished early busy, and wouldn't actually be taken into account in the grading, but that seemed a little too elementary school. Eventually, she settled for discussing the fact that it clearly was, given the number of AIs running around, but whether or not they operated on the sorts of principles that they had studied was hard to determine, given that they tended to aggressively sue and/or shoot laser beams at people who tried to decompile them. It wasn't exactly a great answer, but Nancy figured she ought to get some credit for all the material she did manage to work in.

In the cafeteria when it was all over, the last question was the sole topic of discussion. Doreen was enthusiastic: apparently it was obvious to her from all those discussion breaks in the lectures that Hale was herself hoping to create an AI of her own, and so obviously she would be more likely to mark people who said it was highly. Maybe, she speculated, Hale had in fact succeeded, and had put the question on the midterm so that she could reveal her efforts in class next week as a surprise. She tempered her response, though, when Werner came to sit with them, sympathising with him about having to answer a question that put doubt on his very existence.

"`DO NOT WORRY, I WAS NOT OFFENDED`," he said.

Nancy found it hard to judge his sincerity from the monotonous voice, and so wasn't sure whether to discuss it further -- God alone knew she'd said the same thing a thousand times over the years without meaning it -- but Ken, who had been quizzing them all about how they'd responded, asked him, "So what did you put?"

"`I CONCLUDED THAT ANY INTELLIGENCE, HUMAN, ARTIFICIAL, OR OTHERWISE, CANNOT BE CONSIDERED TRUE, BUT ONLY A MOMENTARY ALIGNMENT OF SMALL SUBDIVISIONS OF THE COSMOS AS IT SLIDES INEVITABLY TOWARDS MAXIMUM ENTROPY, GIVEN MEANING ONLY IN RELATION TO THEMSELVES`."

Nancy suppressed the urge to smile at the predictability of Werner's gloomy outlook on life -- they'd never quite been able to work out how much of his nihilistic view of the world was residual Hydra programming, how much the result of his ... unique life experiences, and how much he'd just always been that way, but Nancy increasingly thought that the last one was the biggest part. But when she saw the earnest "I wish _I'd_ put that" look on Ken's face, she broke out into a grin.

"OK, you know what, I think we're done talking about the midterm," Tomas said. "Until Professor Hale returns them next week--"

"Or her AI does," Doreen interrupted. "Oooh, what if the real point of setting that question was to use our responses as a training set for its..." She tailed off, realising that the others really were done talking about it. Just before Tomas was about to speak again, she finished quietly, "self-awareness module."

"Let's go out somewhere," Nancy said.

"Good idea," Tomas agreed. "That was the very last midterm, we deserve to let our hair down a bit. And we do live in New York, we should be making the most of it. Let's get out of ESU, head into the city--"

"There might be crimes that need to be _foiled_ ," Ken said excitedly.

"By other people, not us," Doreen shouted, for the benefit of all the people who hadn't been eavesdropping on their conversation, but started to as a result of her being so loud.

"There might be," Tomas allowed. "But I was thinking more of doing something actually relaxing."

"We could go and take in a Broadway show," Doreen suggested.

"Or visit MoMA," Nancy said.

They turned to Tomas, whose idea having a trip out had been, to see which he preferred, or if he had another idea. "Wait," he said to Ken. "How is 'foiled' a fish pun?"

"Sometimes you wrap fish in foil to cook it?"

"What about you, Brain Drain?" Doreen said. "Are you coming too?"

"`BEING IN THE PRESENCE OF FELLOW TEMPORARILY SELF-AWARE ARRANGEMENTS OF PARTICLES MAKES THE ULTIMATE FUTILITY OF EXISTENCE MORE BEARABLE`," he said. "`I WILL COME WITH YOU TO WITNESS THE DISSIPATION OF ENERGY IN NEW AND DIFFERENT WAYS I AM AS YET UNFAMILIAR WITH.`"

"That's the spirit," Nancy said.

* * *

After a brief search on their smartphones revealed quite how expensive Broadway shows were, even for a weekday matinee, they decided to try the MoMA option. They were stuck in the queue, and about to give up to just go and chill in Central Park, when a team of four people started installing a new artwork outside.

The five of them weren't the only ones to break away from the queue to see what was going on, but they were among the first. When the museum staff stepped away, they saw a sphere floating in mid-air. In some ways, it looked like a soap bubble, shifting rainbow patterns sliding across its surface. And yet if you looked below that surface layer, it seemed to be a solid ball of metal with a silvery sheen. Simultaneously, however, it seemed to be subtly glowing with a soft blue-white light. The sense of contradiction was enhanced by the fact that there was no visible means of support: the illusion that it was floating in stark contrast to its seeming solidity.

All around them, people started speculating about who the artist was -- apparently there had been no prior announcement about this at all -- and debating the meaning of the work. Nancy was not at all surprised that her friends fell instead to discussing how it worked.

"There must be a really thin support," Ken was saying. "Made of some sort of extremely strong but transparent material."

"Or it has its own antigravity unit," Tomas speculated.

"Yeah, but how many artists have access to that sort of tech?" Doreen said.

"You can download basic blueprints from all sorts of places," Nancy said. At their surprised looks, she said, "What? You've never found yourself clicking a bunch of links on Wikipedia?"

"Maybe the artist knows Tony," Doreen said. "Or maybe they're a mutant and the X-Men helped out?"

"Maybe it _is_ a mutant, a shapechanging one, doing some sort of performance art," Tomas said.

"Maybe," Doreen said. She gave the sphere a little wave. "Hi there! Good job on getting the world to appreciate and admire instead of hate and fear you!"

"I think Ken's right," Nancy said. "There's something holding it up." She approached the sphere, intending to feel around it for whatever trick they were using. But as she approached, the soap bubble patterns on the surface seemed to freeze, and the glow became a brilliant actinic white. A huge spark surged towards her--

Nancy's last thought as she was flung backwards through the air was: _Huh, I never thought being struck by lightning would feel like that._


	2. Chapter 2

When Nancy woke up, she was surprised to find herself in her own bed, rather than the hospital. Something made her feel as though she ought to have plaster casts on all four limbs, but when she flexed her fingers and toes they revealed just the usual amount of early morning not-woken-up-yet stiffness.

A few moments later, Doreen started hammering on the door. "Nancy, wake up! Wake up, Nancy!"

Had she been dreaming? She must have been dreaming, Nancy decided. She shook her head a few times to try to clear it.

"I overslept, Nancy," came Doreen's voice through the door. "We have like negative one point five minutes to leave the house."

Had Doreen said that in her dream? She wasn't sure. It seemed familiar. But trying to remember dreams was like that: it faded, and your memory confabulated it with the things you were starting to pick up from the real world.

"I don't want to be late for the Neural Networks and Adaptive Learning midterm," Doreen said.

Nancy stood up and went to the door. "Hey," Doreen said.

"I'll go get in the shower," Nancy said blearily, still trying to work out what had happened in her dream. It felt so vivid, like real memories, not just her brain sorting through the detritus of the day.

"We won't make the subway now but I can still jump us across to campus if we're ready in the next ten minutes," Doreen said.

"Good idea," Nancy said. She remembered _that_ part of the dream all right: the feeling of being wrapped up in Doreen's arms. That was the sort of dream she had a lot anyway.

"Really?" Doreen said. "You think it's a good idea."

"If we really do have negative one point five minutes to catch the subway."

"More like negative point three recurring now," Doreen said. She headed back to her bedroom to change into her Squirrel Girl costume.

"It's dumb, you know, making us do a pen-and-paper test to prove that we have learned how to make machines learn. The midterm should be to write code that can pass the midterm, or something."

"I'm sure if you write an essay about that, you'll get full credit," Doreen said. "After all, you spent most of the study time last night going on about it, so it's what you're prepared for!"

"Whoa. Doreen, was that ... Was that a burn?"

"You know I get stressed by tests," Doreen said. "And by being late. And now both are happening at the same time, and here you are chatting away as though we're not late for a test when you should be showering and brushing your teeth." As she spoke, Doreen used just a tiny bit of her strength to propel Nancy through the door of the bathroom and into the shower cubicle. She passed Nancy her toothbrush and added, "At the same time!"

Ending up standing in the shower with soaked pyjamas had happened in her dream too.

* * *

Nancy showered as quickly as she could, distracted by the implications of her dream having been so realistic and apparently so prophetic.

"Come on, come on, we have to go!" Doreen said as she passed Nancy clothes. It was, Nancy realised with a slightly sickening feeling, the exact same badly co-ordinated outfit dream-Doreen had chosen.

"Listen, Doreen, something weird's happening--"

"I'm sorry I was rude to you," Doreen said. "I usually try to save my sassy side for supervillains who deserve it--"

"No," Nancy said as she dressed quickly. "It's-- I dreamt all this. Oversleeping. You turning on the shower before I'd undressed--"

"Yo," Tippy-Toe said. "Have some coffee before you go."

Doreen took it gratefully, and Nancy was about to follow suit when she remembered. "Tippy, is this acorn coffee?" she asked, putting it back down on the counter as though it was an unexploded grenade.

"Best kind," Tippy-Toe and Doreen said simultaneously.

"Doreen, I _dreamed that too_."

"Huh," Doreen said. "That is weird. We can talk about it on the way, though, 'cos, y'know, _late_."

On their cross-rooftop journey, they discussed the weird situation. The feelings Nancy remembered from her dream -- the same feelings she always had in these situations, of being overwhelmed by sheer physical proximity to Doreen and the casual demonstration of her superpowers -- were still there, but she was also becoming increasingly weirded out.

Doreen, however, just seemed excited. "Maybe you have precognitive powers and they're just switching on! Hey, does that mean you know the questions on the midterm?"

"Will you believe me that I dreamed all this if I do?" Nancy said.

"Wait, though," Doreen said. "If you do have precognitive knowledge of it, that would be cheating. No, don't tell me."

"But how else will I convince you?" Nancy said.

"I'm convinced!" Doreen said. "Of course I'm convinced. We just need to work out what it means. Imagine if you start having dreams that can tell us what crimes are going to be committed, and we can stop them before they happen." She paused for a moment on landing as she seemed to remember something. When she took off again, she said, "Oh, wait, no. Bad idea. Really, really bad idea. _Don't_ tell me about any crimes. That would be even worse than telling me about the midterm."

"OK," Nancy said, somewhat nonplussed.

"So ... did you dream about any crimes this time?"

"You just told me not to tell you!"

"No, you're right, I'm sorry. But did you?"

"No, it was just the midterm. And then it all went a bit weird at the end, just before I woke up--"

* * *

As Doreen was changing out of her Squirrel Girl costume, Nancy filled Ken and Tomas in as quickly as she could on the whole dream thing. Ken seemed a little too excited at the possibility that she would have powers now, as though she was finally going to be a proper member of the gang. She guessed it was difficult for him being so obviously Chipmunk Hunk's sidekick, even though his powers were actually more impressively wide-ranging when you thought about it.

They rapidly came to the same conclusion Doreen had that if Nancy did have genuine precognitive knowledge of the test, they didn't want her to share it. Tomas even went so far as to say that Nancy ought to write whatever she remembered writing from her dream. Nancy countered that stuff that seemed like it made sense in dreams didn't necessarily in reality, but she didn't share that she still remembered the in-depth discussion about it that had followed in the dream. Nancy still felt the need to prove that there was something weird going on -- to herself, as much as anyone else -- and so, when they were all turning their phones off, she waited until the others all had before texting the final question to their group chat.

Professor Hale gave her an icy stare. "Miss Whitehead? Are you quite finished?"

"I'm turning it off right _now_ ," Nancy said, smiling back at her as the paper thudded down onto the desk in front of her.

The paper _was_ identical to the one she had dreamed. Now, on reaching the final question, she didn't have the problem of deciding what to write because she wasn't sure what to answer, but because of the ethical dilemma of whether to use her original ideas or borrow from one or more of the others. On the one hand, anything _she_ dreamed was officially the product of the Nancy Whitehead Subconscious TM, Pat. Pending, so it wasn't _really_ cheating. On the other, if she had accurately dreamed the future then the others were going to be writing those things anyway, and Hale would suspect collusion -- and probably finger Nancy as the cheat. Especially if she borrowed from Brain Drain's version; his nihilism presumably made his writing style rather memorable to all their professors.

In the end, she wrote as near as she could remember to what she had originally put. If this was a superpower, so far it sucked. "Takes The Same Midterm Twice Girl" was not something she was interested in becoming.

* * *

In the cafeteria, the discussion was all about the final question, just as it had been in her dream. But instead of debating what they had written, they were all staring in shock at their phones, where Nancy's message had got through once they'd turned them back on.

"I have to admit, I'm a little freaked out," Doreen said.

"I'm a _lot_ freaked out," Nancy said.

"So what happened next in your dream?" Ken asked.

"Oh, we ended up going to MoMA," Nancy said. "That was where-- There's a weird thing there."

"There are lots of weird things at MoMA," Tomas said. "That's kind of the point of MoMA, isn't it?"

"It was a sculpture, or at least it looked like it was. But it floated in mid-air, and we were talking about how did it do that, and I got closer--"

"OK, come on, let's go to MoMA, and see if we can figure out this weird dream thing."

"Oh, hey, Werner, you came too," Nancy said.

"`I DO NOT DREAM`," Werner said. "`BUT I AM WILLING TO FOLLOW THE DREAMS OF OTHERS`."

"That's the spirit," Nancy said.

* * *

It was only when they got to MoMA much earlier than they had in the dream that Nancy realised the sphere sculpture wouldn't be being erected (or floated, or whatever the right term was) until much later, if her dream was accurate. She was keen to spend a few hours mooching around the museum, but the others persuaded her to investigate. A few fruitless hours of "accidentally" wandering into staff-only areas later, they still hadn't found anything useful.

Tomas came and found them while they were trying to work out how to break into the catalogue database, to see if they could find out what the sculpture was.

"You were supposed to be keeping watch," Doreen hissed at him.

"Something's going on outside," Tomas said. "I think it might be them putting it up."

"Already?" Doreen said.

Nancy checked her watch. "No, it was about now. Damn."

"We may have got a _little_ distracted by the interesting hacking problem," Doreen admitted.

They picked up Ken and Werner and headed outside. The museum workers were already packing away, and a crowd had already gathered around the sphere. They pushed their way through all the people pondering the meaning of the sculpture.

"This is the thing?" Doreen said.

"This is the thing," Nancy said.

"Wait, what's holding it up?" Ken asked.

Nancy clicked her fingers. " _That_ is exactly what we were talking about. And I went over to it--"

As she approached closer, it all started to happen again: the build up in its energy levels, the white glare--

"Nancy!" Doreen shouted to her as she tumbled through the air. Her face span round and round in Nancy's vision as she yelled, "I don't think it was a dream at all! I think you might be stuck in a time loop!"


	3. Chapter 3

"Nancy, wake up! Wake up, Nancy!"

Doreen's voice again. She'd been shouting something in Nancy's dream and now here she was shouting real life. Probably her brain had incorporated the idea that Doreen was shouting into the logic of the dream--

"I overslept, Nancy; we have like negative one point five minutes to leave the house."

No, wait, wait just a second. What was it that Doreen had been shouting? Something about a time loop.

"You were right," Nancy said, as she opened the door. "I'm stuck in a time loop."

"When did I say you were stuck in a time loop?" Doreen asked.

"You didn't," Nancy said. "Yet."

Doreen took a moment. "Whoaaa." She looked at Nancy. "When I woke up late, I just thought we had midterm problems. Now it turns out we have time loop problems _and_ midterm problems? Whoa."

"I think we mostly have time loop problems," Nancy said.

"Well, sure, but there's also the midterm which we're going to be _really late_ for now."

"Not if you jump us to campus," Nancy said.

"Is that how we solved it last time? Cool. I'll go and get changed." She carried on speaking after disappearing into her bedroom. "This _is_ pretty cool. Oh wait, don't tell me any of the questions on the midterm though, that would be cheating. And you'd better make sure you put the same--"

"I've already taken that damn midterm twice, Doreen!" Nancy shouted.

"From some points of view, sure," Doreen said.

"Yes, mine!" Nancy said, but Doreen was getting into her working-out-all-the-angles flow now.

"But what if you don't end up in the time loop next time? You haven't taken it from Professor Hale's point of view, have you?"

"I guess not, but--"

"Nancy, do you want to let some stupid time loop make you fail the midterm? Because, just so you know, that would be exactly like letting the bad guys win." She struck her most Squirrel-Girl-upholder-of-justice pose.

"Really, even when it's like a ... force of nature thing?"

"Do we know it's a force of nature?"

"No, we know nothing about it!" Nancy said. "That's why we're better off researching it than wasting time in the same midterm for the third day in a row!"

"Third day in a row for you," Doreen said. "Only the first for me."

"What are you two arguing about?" Tippy-Toe said, bounding over. "Your acorn coffee's going cold."

* * *

Rather reluctantly, Nancy allowed Doreen to take her to campus for the midterm. On their journey, she filled her in on the events of the first two loops -- minus any details of the questions. By the time they arrived, they had the outline of a plan. It was actually brilliant in its simplicity: they would avoid going to MoMA. If they weren't anywhere near the sphere when it ... activated, or whatever had happened, then surely the loop would be broken.

"But what if someone else gets hit by it instead?" Ken said, when they were discussing the situation in the cafeteria after the test.

"Oh, dang," Doreen said. "You're right. We can't do the plan." She closed down the browser window on her phone on which she'd been looking up ways to get cheap Broadway tickets.

"What?" Nancy said. "No. It's a great plan. It was mostly _your_ plan, Doreen Green."

"But what if it's just the first person to get too close to it who gets sent back in time?" Doreen said. " _You_ might escape the loop, but someone else would get put in it instead. Someone who might not realise what's going on; someone who doesn't have friends who have the ... ah, resources to help with this sort of situation."

"Making me go back into the situation is not what I would call helping with it," Nancy said.

"`I KNOW WHAT IT IS TO EXPERIENCE LIFE AS A NEVERENDING REITERATION OF THE SAME STIMULI LEADING TO THE SAME RESPONSES,`" Werner said. "`TO LACK CONTROL OVER ONE'S OWN FATE IS A TERRIBLE THING.`"

Nancy couldn't tell whether he was sympathising with her, or appealing to her to sympathise with Ken and Doreen's hypothetical other time loop victims. It was only when she realised that they were all looking at her that she decided it was the latter. "OK, fine," she said. "We're going to MoMA."

* * *

Their search of the museum was rendered more efficient by Nancy telling them what leads hadn't turned anything up last time around, but they still didn't come up with anything particularly useful.

She allowed Doreen to spend a little while on trying to crack the catalogue database, again using her knowledge from the previous loop to speed the process up. But as the time of her encounter with the sphere approached, with no progress made, she began to feel increasingly anxious.

"I'm nearly there," Doreen said. "I'm fairly sure. And even if we can't use it now, if you remember--"

"Oh, great, so we're using me as a way to get information into the next loop now, are we? I thought we were trying to make sure it didn't happen at all."

"We might need one more go," Doreen conceded. "I guess."

"I'm not taking the midterm again," Nancy said.

"But--"

"No, Doreen," Nancy said. "I'm probably about to have that argument with past you all over again when you don't know what's going on, don't make me have it with you now as well."

"Future past me will be right though," Doreen said, not quite under her breath.

"Come on, it was about now that it happened," Nancy said. "If we really are going to worry about someone else getting caught up in it--"

They made it out onto a balcony, only to see the sculpture already being installed. Nancy could see that Doreen was calculating trajectories in her head. "I could jump--" Doreen began, just as Tomas and Ken rounded the corner shouting about how they were too late.

But then Nancy, with a rising sense of horror, saw the sphere not simply floating in the air where it had been placed, but moving towards them under its own mysterious power.

"This didn't happen before, did it?" Doreen said. Nancy just about managed to shake her head as the sphere continued to head straight for her.

"It's latched on to you in some way, hasn't it?" Tomas said. Nancy nodded. She wanted more than anything else to run away, but somehow couldn't make her legs move at all. She felt an all-encompassing sense of inevitability as she watched the sphere ascending the side of the building, its apparent size growing from a distant dot.

The experience of being zapped by it was once again accompanied by the sound of Doreen shouting at her. "Tell future-past-me 'Code Roommate Tau'!"


	4. Chapter 4

"Nancy, wake up! Wake up, Nancy!"

Nancy jerked awake, suddenly coming to a full realisation of what was going on. It wasn't a dream, or a vision from a parallel universe, or whatever else; it was her life now, until they fixed things. She stumbled to the door and before Doreen had got further than saying that she'd overslept, she said to her, "Code Roommate Tau."

"What's Code Roommate Tau?" Doreen said, which wasn't the response Nancy had been expecting.

"You told me--"

"No, I-- Wait, tau like in relativity, tau as _time_? Did _Future-Me_ tell you ...? But Future-Me wouldn't pollute the timeline by trying to get a message to Past-Me, surely? Unless--"

Nancy's enjoyment of watching Doreen puzzle it out wasn't enough to overcome her increasing sense of desperation at the situation she was stuck in. "I'm stuck in a time loop, Doreen," she said.

"Whoa," Doreen said. "A time loop. Wait! Don't tell me anything about the midterm!"

Nancy grabbed Doreen by the shoulders. "Listen to me very carefully. I. Am. Not. Taking. The. Midterm. I have taken it three times already and written the same damned answers because you insisted that I should."

"I really think--" Nancy felt Doreen looking into her eyes, and clearly she saw something there that made her change her mind. Nancy would have to just hope that she didn't look completely unhinged. "OK, no midterm. So what do we do?"

"I don't know!"

"But Past-Future-Me gave you a code to give to ... me," Doreen said. "Was that really all there was?"

"Well, I thought maybe there was more to it, but it seems pretty clear it was a code she just made up there and then."

"But a code that I knew she-- I mean, she knew I-- would understand," Doreen said. She was starting to pace now. "You need to tell me everything that happened."

Before Nancy could start explaining, though, Tippy-Toe came over. "What are you still doing here? I thought you had that thing where you have to write about where all the acorns are--"

"That's not really what a midterm is, Tippy," Nancy said.

"But I thought you had to show that you'd remembered stuff," Tippy-Toe said. "And that's pretty much the only thing worth remembering, right?"

"Nancy's trapped in a time loop," Doreen said. "Ooh!" she said. "How long is it?"

"What time is it now?" Nancy said. She glanced at the alarm clock that had failed to wake her four "mornings" in a row: 08:14am. "About six and a half hours, I guess. It was just after half past two."

"You don't even get a whole day?" Doreen said. "That sucks. I'm pretty sure you're supposed to get a whole day."

"I'll file my complaint with the time travel ombudsman just as soon as I'm _not trapped in a time loop any more_."

"OK, OK," Doreen said. "So what happened?"

Nancy did her best to explain everything, though it was difficult at times to remember exactly which variation on the events had happened on which iteration of the loop. If she was already starting to lose her grip on the sequence of events after just three resets, what would happen to her if they didn't manage to break the loop?

"All right, then, let's not go to MoMA," Doreen said.

"That was my plan last time!" Nancy protested. "But then you all--"

"Yeah, you said," Doreen said. "But now we know that it _is_ interested in you specifically, so--"

"OK, so what do we do instead?"

* * *

They headed to Staten Island, and were eating falafels when they spotted a news report on a TV in a shop window. The ticker read: "Flying sphere spotted over bay. Superheroes probably involved, say city authorities."

"Dammit," said Doreen, dropping her food all over the sidewalk.

Pretty soon the sphere was visible on the horizon, a strange shimmering dot. They tried to outrun it, but soon enough Nancy felt herself being propelled back in time once again.

On the next loop, they spent the day riding around on the subway, which wasn't anywhere near as fun. The sphere found them there too, seemingly phasing through hundreds of feet of rock and the subway car itself, before zapping Nancy again.

Nancy was beginning to get good at convincing Doreen of the main aspects of her story without wasting too much time, even as she herself felt increasingly unsure of what they were. At least now that they were trying to evade the sphere, she wasn't just repeating almost exactly the same day each time. This time, Doreen was sufficiently concerned that she called her mom and arranged for them to go to Canada at extremely short notice.

That time, waking up felt to Nancy exactly as though she had fallen 33,000 feet as well as being projected six and a half hours back in time.

* * *

"The Moon," Doreen said the next/same morning, after Nancy had finished explaining their failed attempts to date. "We'll go to the frigging Moon."

"Er, how?" Nancy said.

And that was how she found herself being teleported to Avengers Island and being strapped into a "borrowed" quinjet. "Am I supposed to pilot this thing?" Nancy asked, seeing the controls in front of her.

"Do you know how?" Doreen said.

"No!" Nancy said. "Do you?"

"Well, _kinda_ ," Doreen said. "But the autopilot's really good, so it's just like coding, really. Isn't it?"

After a takeoff that was much bumpier that Nancy would have liked, they were in space within minutes. Doreen released herself from her seat and then came over to undo Nancy's straps. They floated to the window.

Once she was satisfied that she almost certainly wasn't going to barf, Nancy said, "It's beautiful, isn't it?"

"Space is pretty ... space-y," Doreen said with a sigh. "You'll like the Moon," she said.

The combination of the starlight and the reflected light from the controls lit the wistful expression on Doreen's face in a way that Nancy found even more appealing than usual. They were alone, just the two of them, tens of thousands of miles from anywhere else. If she couldn't manage to say something now, she was never going to do it, was she? "Listen, Doreen--"

There was a soft chime from one of the instruments, and Doreen turned to look at it. "Hey, Nancy, you know you said the whatever-it-was was a sphere ..." She pointed at the display.

Nancy looked at the readout on the screen. An object was approaching at a significant fraction of the speed of light. It appeared to have a spherical profile, and was resisting the quinjet's automated systems' best attempts at spectroscopic analysis.

The quinjet's dashboard clock was horrendously confusing, but she found the part that corresponded to Eastern time: 14:35.

"You could at least have let us get to the Moon first," Nancy said to the sphere as it slid its way into the cockpit.


	5. Chapter 5

"Nancy, wake up! Wake up, Nancy!"

This was definitely not the Moon.

"You know what, Doreen? I'm not feeling great," Nancy said.

"Oh, what's wrong? Do you need me to get you anything? Should I call the doctor and make you an appointment?"

"No, no, I think I just need to rest," Nancy said.

"You'll miss the--"

"Midterm, I know," Nancy said. "You go. You can still make it if you jump across town."

"Huh, I guess I can at that," Doreen said. She opened the door quietly and stepped in. "Nancy, are you sure you're OK?"

"I will be," Nancy said, adding an entirely artificial croakiness to her voice. "Honestly, go."

"OK," Doreen said. "I'll try and explain to Professor Hale--"

"Sure," Nancy said. She smiled weakly. "Thanks. But you don't want to be late."

* * *

Nancy felt awful about not sharing what was really going on with Doreen but after the last few days she'd had, and the apparent futility of any attempt at escape, she figured she deserved a duvet day. If the sphere was going to find her anywhere, it may as well be in her own apartment after she'd had a good rest, and could make a fresh attempt at breaking the loop on the reset.

Waking up again at a time when Doreen and the others would just be coming out of the midterm (presumably they were in the cafeteria, discussing that weird final question about AI), she first tried doing some knitting to relax herself. But it was hard to stay motivated when she knew that all her work would be undone a few hours later. She settled for posting a lot of pictures of Mew on the internet.

After picking up a few likes from her most devoted followers, though, it occurred to Nancy that they hadn't actually tried searching for information about this sort of situation yet. Unfortunately, however, all she managed to find were stories, a few weird social media accounts claiming to be time travellers from the future stuck in the past that were almost certainly long-term trolls, but couldn't be completely dismissed out of hand -- Nancy remembered what Doreen had told her about the newspaper adverts she'd placed when she found herself in the 1960s, and it was just possible this was the same sort of thing. When she eventually managed to get hold of some cases of time loops with at least some actual evidence to back them up, none of the details matched her situation at all.

At 2:35pm, the sphere floated through the wall of the apartment, startling Mew, and Nancy, who had managed to lose track of the time by disappearing down a series of Wikipedia links and now had several tabs open mostly involving people arguing about exactly which superheroes' powers most violated the tenets of relativity.

This time, her trip back in time was accompanied by Mew's alarmed miaow.

* * *

Restored by having had at least some rest, but also alarmed at the possibility that she might stop fighting the loop permanently, on the next loop Nancy tried to impress on Doreen the urgency of the situation even more than she had previously. As they sipped their acorn coffee together (Nancy was, against her better judgement, developing a taste for it), Doreen decided that they needed help.

Which was how Nancy found herself as 2:35pm approached sitting in the really far too swish apartment belonging to two of Doreen's Avengers friends. She tried not to feel jealous of the cosy domesticity of the Kaplan-Altman household, but she kept finding herself imagining that it wouldn't be too different to this if she and Doreen ever did somehow get together. Of course, that would require her to be able to say anything about her feelings ever. If she couldn't manage it when they were trapped on a spaceship together, with the supremely excellent get-out clause of Doreen almost inevitably not remembering anything she said, then Nancy was pretty sure that was going to be not happening for a long time to come.

After a very nice lunch, they had set down to business. Nancy was now sitting cross-legged in a circle, while Billy -- no, Wiccan, he was definitely Wiccan right now -- was muttering away to himself, doing some sort of ritual to try to determine what was happening to Nancy and/or guard her against the sphere when it made its inevitable appearance.

"Well, your mind _is_ mismatched with your body," Billy said when the ritual was over and Teddy was giving Nancy a tall glass of lemonade.

"Thanks," Nancy said sardonically.

"He's not explaining it very well, is he?" Teddy said.

Billy sighed. "It's your consciousness that's being projected back in time, not _you_."

"Which is why I'm never actually injured," Nancy said. "Luckily enough." She stretched her arms, feeling the places where she remembered being hurt by being thrown by the discharge from the sphere.

"Exactly," Billy said. "But I'm afraid I can't work out what's causing it. Everything you described about what's been happening to you seems like it's technological in nature, not magical. But it's much more like a magical effect than any technology I've ever heard of. Which makes me think some sort of extradimensional entity is involved."

"You know who we need, don't you?" Teddy said.

"I think she's busy," Billy said. "She has a lot on these days."

"Who?" said Nancy.

"We're running out of time," Doreen said, pointing out of the window as the sphere approached at speed. "You should tell Nancy so that she remembers for the next go round."

"America Chavez," Teddy said, even as Billy was trying to stop him.

"Oh, right," Doreen said. "That does make sense."

"Who?" Nancy said as the sphere zapped her once again.

* * *

Nancy was impressed by America, slightly against her will. She secretly wanted not to have heard of her because she wasn't anyone important, but it was pretty clear that she was the real deal. Doreen said she was some sort of protector of the multiverse. America's low-key flirting with her didn't hurt either, for all that enjoying it made Nancy feel as though she was betraying her still-unspoken feelings for Doreen.

"So how many times have you been around the loop now?" America asked as she raided the kitchen for more snacks.

"A dozen or so, I think," Nancy said. "I've kind of lost track."

"I think you had the right idea with hiding from it to try to break the loop," America said. "But you didn't go far enough."

"So, what, we should go to Mars?" Doreen said. "Pluto? Find a wormhole and go visit the Shi'ar galaxy? I'm pretty sure Gladiator owes me a favour."

"Further than that," America said. "Another dimension entirely."

And then, quite suddenly, floating in space between the couch and the TV, was a large glowing blue star.

"Wow," Nancy said.

"That's--" Doreen said. She turned to America, looking hopeful. "Can I ...? Does it even work that way?"

"Be my guest," America said.

* * *

"I got to punch _reality itself_ and I don't remember it?" Doreen said the next-same morning. "Man, that sucks." She finished her acorn coffee and said, "So what happened after that, anyway?"

"It's really hard to describe," Nancy said. "It was all abstract colours and shapes and lines and I don't think I really remember it either, not properly."

"Except that the sphere thing still found us there?"

"Your friend Billy did say it was extradimensional," Nancy said. "The time before that, I mean. Looks like he was right."

"So what are we supposed to do now?" Doreen said. "Billy and Teddy put us on to America; did she give you any ideas what we could try next?"

"I really don't know if we'll have time before the loop resets; we had to go through them to get hold of America, and then she'd need to get hold of this other guy--"

"Which other guy?" Doreen asked. "I mean, I might know him." Nancy made an "I think it's fairly unlikely" face. "It's not impossible. I know a lot of people."

* * *

"I AM RATHER BUSY, SQUIRREL GIRL," Galactus said. "MANY CHANGES ARE AFOOT IN THE CONTINUA."

They were standing in the middle of Central Park. Or rather, Galactus was standing in the middle of Central Park, and Nancy, Doreen and Tippy-Toe were stood in the palm of his hand which he was holding up just in front of his face.

Nancy was acutely aware of the number of people were pointing and staring, and the increasing numbers of police cars and superheroes establishing a perimeter from which they watched warily. Tomas and Ken seemed to be managing to reassure them that everything was fine for now, but Nancy wasn't sure how long the fact that his costume had changed colour was going to be convincing by itself.

"Like I say, I really appreciate you making time for us," Doreen said. "You're a good friend." 

"AS ARE YOU, SQUIRREL GIRL."

"OK, this is officially weird now," Nancy said. "When did you--"

"And congrats on that whole 'lifebringer' thing," Doreen continued. "Suits you."

"AS I SAID, MANY CHANGES ARE AFOOT."

"But you're still rocking that hat," Doreen said. "I admire your commitment to being fashion forward."

"Can we get to the point?" Nancy said.

"AS MUCH AS I WOULD LOVE TO DISCUSS THE FINER DETAILS OF COSMIC MILLINERY, YOUR FRIEND IS CORRECT," Galactus said. "WE SHOULD INDEED GET TO THE POINT."

"My friend _is_ the point," Doreen said. "Nancy, do you want to tell Galactus your story?"

The obvious answer was "Er, no", but somehow Nancy managed to outline her situation at least semi-coherently.

"A MOST PECULIAR SET OF OCCURRENCES," Galactus said. "AND THE SOURCE IS NEAR THIS LOCATION?"

Nancy checked the time on her phone, trying to ignore the fact that it claimed to be more than fully charged and be getting 200% signal. "They bring it out in about an hour," she said.

Doreen was helpfully pointing in the direction of MoMA. Galactus began to walk -- the scenery around them took a series of juddering leaps up and down -- but Tippy-Toe screeched, "Wait!"

"WHAT IS IT, MY FRIEND?" Galactus asked.

"Well, number one, you're about to squash that tree that that one cousin of mine lives in," Tippy-Toe said. "But number two, I think you're scaring all those people."

Nancy looked down at the perimeter and saw that some of the superheroes were assembling what looked very much like the sort of thing you'd use to try and take out a force of nature older than the universe. "She's right."

"IT WOULD BE A SUPREME IRONY IF I WERE UNABLE TO HELP YOU BECAUSE OF THE SHORT-SIGHTEDNESS OF YOUR SPECIES," Galactus said.

"Yeah, that is a bummer," Doreen replied.

"I MUST LEAVE," Galactus said. "BUT I WILL TELL YOU THAT I CANNOT AT THIS TIME DETECT ANYTHING ANOMALOUS. BUT IF YOU ARE CORRECT ABOUT YOUR EXPERIENCES, FRIEND OF SQUIRREL GIRL, THEN THE WHOLE FABRIC OF REALITY IS AT RISK."

"It is?" Nancy said. "That sounds like a lot of responsibility for ... well, anyone."

"WE ALL DO WHAT WE MUST," Galactus said solemnly, kneeling down and lowering his hand to the ground so that they could climb off. The change in his posture triggered even more alarm amongst those watching.

"Well, I think what I must do is go try to stop those people doing whatever it is they plan to do," Doreen said. "What is an 'ultimate nullifier' anyway?"

"GOODBYE," Galactus said, and vanished in a crackling haze.

It was probably a good thing, Nancy thought, that no one else was going to remember any of this. Even by New York standards, this was a particularly weird day.


	6. Chapter 6

Shortly after Galactus had departed, the sphere shot across the streets towards them and sent Nancy back once more.

Doreen was once again upset that she didn't remember anything Nancy described of their recent adventures. But one particular detail of Nancy's account struck her as particularly relevant: the fact that Galactus had been certain he was unable to detect anything unusual going on, even just before the sphere appeared.

"What if it's somehow travelling _back_ in time?" Doreen said. "What if it really doesn't exist until just before it zaps you?"

"So all the help in the world is no good, because there isn't time to even work out what's going on before everything resets," Nancy said. "I guess that could make sense. It would explain why everyone we tried to get to help couldn't actually do much."

"They were experts on magic and dimensions and ... well, almost everything, in Galactus's case," Doreen said. "But none of them were experts on _time travel_."

* * *

Nancy wasn't as convinced as Doreen that it was "lucky" that the United Nations happened to be in session, and that Doctor Doom was attending in person to represent Latveria.

Getting hold of him was difficult; he seemed to have taken precautions to ensure that Squirrel Girl in particular wouldn't get anywhere near him, diplomatic immunity or no. Three times, Nancy went through the loop, increasingly uncertain about the merits of Doreen's plan, only to find that they had captured a decoy Doombot, not the man himself.

On the fourth try, Nancy convinced Doreen to try something different: surrendering to Doom. That would surely get his attention. Then if they could get him interested in her time loop story, they might be able to persuade him to work with them.

"I don't like this," Doreen said as they waited for Doom to emerge from the building. The crowd they were part of was kept some way back from the entrance, but hopefully close enough for this to work.

"It's OK," Tippy-Toe said to Doreen. "Everyone knows you can take him really."

"Damn right I can," Doreen said.

"And it was your idea to get Doom to help us in the first place," Nancy said.

"I refuse to take responsibility for the ideas of previous selves I don't remember," Doreen said with bad grace.

"Hey! Hey! Doctor Doom!" Nancy yelled as he was heading to his motorcade. "Remember me?"

Doom turned and looked straight at her. It was disconcerting seeing her own distorted reflection in his mask. The rumour was that he didn't need it any more, and only wore it for the effect it had on others. "You!" he said, marching over. "I do remember you, from long ago in my personal timeline. But of course this is your native time zone. Where is Squirrel Girl?"

"Right here," Nancy said. "And she has something she wants to say to you. Don't you, Doreen?" Nancy shoved her forward.

"I surrender," Doreen mumbled.

"Repeat yourself," Doom said.

"I surrender!" Doreen shouted. "I, the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, have decided that the only way to retain that title is to surrender before I am inevitably beaten by the incomparable Doctor Doom."

"Mere sophistry!" Doom laughed. "You are now merely the Surprisingly-hard-but-not-impossible-to-beat Squirrel Girl. Doombots, bring them!"

* * *

"You realise you haven't ever beaten me, don't you?" Doreen said once they'd been shoved into the back of Doom's armoured limousine.

"What is the meaning of this?"

"We just wanted to get your attention," she went on.

"We have a problem," Nancy said. "Or I have a problem. One that we think only you might be able to help with."

"Helping Squirrel Girl -- or her friends -- is not among Doom's priorities."

"What about saving the whole of reality from destruction?" Doreen said.

Doom was silent for a long moment. Nancy had a whole bunch of back up arguments ready to go, about how he wouldn't enjoy not having anyone to rule over or scheme against, but he seemed to think about it, much more seriously than she'd have expected, and then just said, "Speak."

* * *

After Nancy had told her story -- she was getting quite good at it now, even if telling it to Doom was somehow even more nerve-wracking than Galactus -- Doom was still unconvinced. He had them locked in a room at the Latverian embassy when the sphere floated in through the front doors at 2:33pm.

"Your story is not some strange fiction, then," Doom said.

"A bit late for you to realise that now!" Doreen said, struggling as she had been for the last two hours against the ropes he had insisted on having her tied in. Nancy had got away with having her hands cuffed.

"If you are correct, then the whole of reality is endangered."

"We told you that hours ago," Nancy said.

"We must find a way to pass information into the next loop."

"It's called me, my brain," Nancy said. Doom looked sceptical, even through the mask. "That's what you get, take it or leave it."

"Wait," Doreen said. "I made up a code for Nancy to give ... me. You need to tell us something that we could only have found out from you, something that will show you that you decided to trust us."

"An idea not wholly without merit," Doom said.

"Dude, did you just compliment me? I think he just complimented me," Doreen said to Nancy.

"If it's already in the building, it'll be coming any second," Nancy said. "Hurry up!"

"If -- when," Doom corrected himself unwillingly, "you start this day again, call this embassy and tell them that you have information for me about Reed Richards."

"Who's Reed Richards?" Doreen asked.

"Precisely," Doom said.

And that was when the sphere floated through the wall.

"Remember, Miss Whitehead, _Reed Richards_."

* * *

A month of working with Doctor Doom -- or Victor, as Doreen insisted on calling him -- later, Nancy still didn't have the faintest idea who Reed Richards was. But the effect the name had on Doom was instant, every single day. He would drop all his planned engagements at the UN to talk to them. About 20% of the time, he would fly into a rage when it turned out they were "deceiving" him, but the rest of the time, he was willing to accept their story. Which turned out to be a good thing, because like it or not, he really was an expert on time travel.

The sphere wasn't extradimensional at all, but, as Doreen had guessed, it had come from the future, and was heading into the past. Somehow it had been interrupted in its progress backwards in time, and needed resetting.

Everything that they had witnessed on the first two loops around it being installed at MoMA was merely the timeline adjusting around its existence as a natural way of preventing a paradox. That was why they had never had any success sneaking around at MoMA before it was installed. Nancy's first contact with it had shorted out its temporal potential -- Victor was dismissive of whoever in the far future had built it for not having protected it properly, the way he did his own armour and the users of his time platform -- and meant that she had turned herself into its reference point for its destination.

To reset it, they would need not only to temporally insulate Nancy (which was easy when you knew how) but provide it with a new "ground". They needed to find the oldest object they could, to send it safely on its way back into the far past. Doreen had objected that objects were really just collections of atoms, so who was to say that any of them were any younger or older than anything else? Victor had pointed out that Nancy was a collection of atoms with a definitive interaction with the sphere. And that was when Nancy had remembered what Werner had put in the original midterm, back before the loop had become a loop.

The details of the plan took another week or so to work out, from Nancy's point of view. The level of detail that Doom expected her to remember each time meant that she was spending longer and longer each morning listening to Doreen's increasingly anxious shouting about the midterm while she tapped all the information into notes on her phone, rather than being able to launch straight into her explanations.

But for the first time in a long time, she began to feel a real optimism that her ordeal in the loop might soon be over. And as she did so, her thoughts turned to her still-unvoiced feelings for Doreen. Having spent so long trapped in a tiny fragment of her life, she was determined that she wasn't going to leave them unvoiced forever. The temptation to try out different approaches on Doreens who were guaranteed to forget everything she had said, whether it went well or (as Nancy thought rather more likely) catastrophically badly, was immense, but Nancy decided that that wouldn't be fair. As they approached the point where she would have at least a chance of breaking out of the loop, though, more and more of her thoughts were preoccupied with what she might say when she did get the chance.


	7. Chapter 7

"Nancy, wake up! Wake up, Nancy!"

"I'm awake!" Nancy was already pulling on her clothes -- showering, she decided, could wait for that evening, when she had finally broken through the loop, as she was confident that she would.

When Nancy opened the door, Doreen said, "I overslept, Nancy; we have like negative one point five minutes to leave the house."

"Never mind one point five minutes, we have six point four hours to save the world."

"You're not making a lot of sense, Nancy."

"I'm stuck in a time loop," Nancy said. "We've had this exact same morning ... dozens, maybe hundreds of times, by now. But it's not just me who's stuck, it's the whole world. Galactus said that if the timeline keeps resetting like this, eventually the fabric of reality will wear thin."

Doreen looked nonplussed. "Galactus--"

"He helped a little," Nancy said. "But we've been working with Doctor Doom _every day_ on solving this problem."

"I think I would remember--"

"No, you wouldn't! Everything gets reset, every time, except _me_."

"So Doctor Doom doesn't remember either?"

"No, but we have a ... codeword. To get him to pay attention to us."

"OK, so what's the codeword? I'll tweet it to him, or whatever, and--"

"No, we don't need him today." Nancy took the cup of acorn coffee Tippy had just made and downed it in one. "Tippy-Toe, we're going to need the squirrels," she said in Squirrelese.

"We are?" Tippy-Toe said.

"Professor Hale has secret AI research," Nancy explained. Tippy-Toe seemed impressed at her ability to frame such a complex concept in chhkkks and eeets.

"She does?" Doreen said. "I knew it!"

"We're going to need you guys to ... liberate it while we're in the midterm," Nancy said.

"On it," Tippy-Toe said.

"And there's one other thing ..."

* * *

"How many times you have taken this midterm?" Doreen asked as they were jumping across the rooftops. It had been some time since they had done this, and the familiar feelings associated with it came rushing back. Nancy felt almost nostalgic, and even more determined than she had been to say something to Doreen. But first they had to get out of the time loop.

"Enough," Nancy said. "I'd frickin' well better pass."

"So what are the questions? No, wait, don't tell me--"

"Yeah," Nancy said. "We had this ethical debate plenty of times too."

* * *

It was long enough since her last attempt at the midterm that Nancy did actually have to think about some of the questions. However, she gave over the final essay to an apology to Professor Hale for literally stealing her research. It felt strange, unburdening herself on paper of the knowledge of the time loop. What Hale would think of it, Nancy wasn't sure; it seemed preposterous, but the fact that it would explain the theft would surely lend credence to it.

* * *

And so they found themselves outside MoMA, watching the sphere being "installed", or rather, as Doom had explained it, installing itself within the timeline. It had chosen this anchor point because Nancy had reached out to it, which had only happened because it had chosen this anchor point. If it was going to be reset, it had to be _here_ , not at some random location it had tracked Nancy down to.

Tomas and Ken were busy putting the finishing touches to the implementation of the AI in the shell of an ancient robot another squadron of squirrels had liberated from the science museum. This was the solution that had evaded them; the sphere obviously recognised the existence of discrete entities by intelligence, but for humans mental and physical evolution happened in parallel. By installing Hale's AI in the old robot, they could confuse the temporal potentials. It had been Nancy's idea, and Doom had told her it had at least a chance of working.

Nancy looked at her watch. 2:34. "Hurry up, boys," she said. If it was going to work, it had to work _now_. If not, it would be back to the drawing board on the next loop.

Ken stepped away from the interface. "Done."

The robot's eyes lit up. "Greetings," it said. "I am--"

"No time, robot," Nancy said. "You know why we've instantiated you, don't you?"

"The knowledge resides in my memory banks."

"You don't have to do this."

"The entire universe is at stake," the robot said. "If this plan fails, my existence is threatened as much as any other."

"Professor Hale is harsh but fair, after all," Doreen said. "She programmed her AI with ethical standards that equip it to self-sacrifice."

The sphere started to hum and crackled, as Nancy had witnessed it do so many times before. The robot lurched unsteadily towards it, cutting it off before it could start to float over to Nancy.

Lightning flickered out from the sphere, and both it and the robot vanished.

* * *

They held an impromptu wake for Hale's AI in the cafeteria. Nancy felt guilty about her central role in its demise; the others were insisting that the code could be rerun on a new platform, but after her experiences of having her consciousness projected backwards in time, Nancy was unconvinced that things could be that simple. Her final essay in the midterm had been a _mea culpa_ as much as an explanation.

"I'm trying to think what we should get Doctor Doom as a thank you gift," Doreen said.

"He doesn't remember any of it," Nancy said. "At least you guys know the basics because of today. And it's Doctor Doom. I'm not sure he's really the thank you gift type."

"I mean, I'd even offer to let him beat me, but it would ruin the whole 'Unbeatable Squirrel Girl' thing, wouldn't it?"

Nancy decided not to tell her how they'd originally persuaded him to become involved. "Maybe we should see if we can actually find out something about Reed Richards."

They were all shocked when they saw Professor Hale herself walk in. Nancy tried her best to slide into her seat and hide behind Doreen, but the Professor made a beeline directly for them. "Miss Whitehead," she said sternly. "I have just read your midterm paper."

"Ah," said Nancy.

"Of course, I was rather later starting marking them than I intended, what with having to deal with a really very strange data breach, Miss Green."

"Er," said Doreen.

"I am very proud to have such lateral thinkers in my class," she said. "I have decided to award you both As." She turned to Tomas and Ken. "And as to you two young men, the ingenuity of installing an incomplete AI matrix in frankly incompatible hardware-- I am very impressed. You can have As too."

"Also, I'm fairly sure I nailed the first three questions," Ken said.

"I am sorry," Nancy said. "About your robot."

"I am too, my dear," Hale said. "But I'm also proud that it chose to do the right thing. I would hope that we would all weigh our own lives that lightly against the fate of the entire universe. If your essay is to be believed, of course. But given what happened this afternoon, I'm inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt. Do you know, they're already saying it was all a big piece of performance art?"

Doreen laughed, and then the others did too, and eventually Nancy found herself joining in.

* * *

Back at the apartment, Doreen insisted on Nancy explaining everything that had happened. Nancy knitted as she did so, delighted to be able to make progress that wouldn't be undone for the first time in subjective months. Nancy decided to leave out a few parts -- including the "surrendering to Doctor Doom" idea -- but Doreen was just as outraged as she had been originally at not remembering their more cosmic adventures.

"What was the best part?"

"This," Nancy said with feeling. "Right now. Tomorrow morning I will wake up in my bed yet again, but it will be _tomorrow_ morning."

"Oh, come on, some parts of it must have been fun."

"When we were trying to run away from it, I guess," Nancy said. "Not so much the subway, man I was coughing by the end of that. But Staten Island, and out in space ..."

"What is it?" Doreen said. "What are you thinking about?"

Nancy put her knitting away methodically and scooted closer to Doreen on the couch. Mew came and jumped up beside her, snuggling into her thigh.

"When we were up in space ..." The words still didn't want to come, but Nancy forced herself to keep talking, so that they would have to eventually, even if it was as part of a flood of nonsense. "That was the closest I came to telling you something that I should have done a long time ago. But then later on I didn't want to, not if I was going to be the only one to remember it."

"Nancy?"

"Doreen, you're the most amazing person I've ever met," Nancy said. "And thanks to you I've met some pretty amazing people -- not just in this whole weird time loop experience, though, you know -- but even then: you're still the most amazing. You're kind and sweet and funny and you kick ass and save the day and you're the most important non-feline person to me in the whole world."

"Nancy ..."

"Shut up, Doreen, I have to finish saying this. I'm in love with you. I have been for ages, so really, an extra couple of months in a time loop of being in love with you hasn't really made that much difference. I don't know how you're going to feel about how I feel, but--"

And that was when Doreen kissed her. Nancy had often imagined that she would taste of acorns, but she hadn't been prepared for quite how overpowering that might be.

"Does that answer your question?" Doreen asked.

"I think so," Nancy said. "Raises a lot of new ones, though," she said with a smile.

"Like?"

"Er, let's start with: have I been embarrassingly obvious all along?" Nancy said.

"No!" Doreen said. "I thought-- Well, I don't know what I thought. But I didn't think you were interested in me at all."

"Well, I didn't think you were interested in me," Nancy said. "What with all those internet dates and what have you."

"The internet dates that all went horribly, badly wrong? I think it took those bad experiences for me to realise that I was definitely looking for my acorns in the wrong hiding place."

"OK, so why didn't you say anything?"

"Probably about the same reason you didn't," Doreen said. "Crippling fear of rejection, that sort of thing."

"I was going with 'not wanting to ruin our friendship'," Nancy said. "OK, so actually, another question: is this going to ruin our friendship?"

"I think it's going to make it _awesome_ ," Doreen said.

Nancy kissed her that time, a long, slow kiss that felt like it would never end.

Eventually, though, it had to, but by the time it had both their hands had roamed quite a long way. It was strange: the whole thing felt so natural that it didn't seem sudden at all. The few times Nancy had been with someone else before now, as soon as things had proceeded to this sort of stage she'd started to feel horribly awkward. But with Doreen, it was as though they'd been together for years already.

"OK, my turn," Doreen said, a lot more hot and bothered than Nancy was used to seeing her. "I have a question."

"Go on," Nancy said.

"This might be a bit, I don't know, _forward_ , but how would you like to wake up in a _different_ bed tomorrow morning? You know, just to be sure?"


End file.
